In the years leading up to 2008, Lehman Brothers transformed leverage into a growth strategy and dissent into a liability. As housing prices peaked and balance sheet risk quietly compounded, governance failures accelerated across the firm. Power concentrated at the top, board oversight weakened, and opaque accounting practices like Repo 105 masked the true scale of leverage. When mortgage delinquencies rose and confidence evaporated, Lehman collapsed almost instantly, triggering the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history and freezing global credit markets. This report traced the failure back to structural governance breakdowns, misaligned incentives, and the systematic silencing of risk voices, concluding that collapse was not caused by market shock alone but by an internal erosion of accountability long before September 2008.
